Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday August 10, 2012 @05:22PM
from the less-filling-tastes-great dept.

New submitter jolle sends word that stable builds for CyanogenMod 9 rolled out to their servers last night, supporting a wide range of devices. Downloads here. From their announcement:
"[This] release is for the majority of our ICS supported devices, the stragglers will catch up, and we will leave the door open for merging in additional devices from maintainers, external and internal. The team itself, will focus solely on Jelly Bean and maintenance of the CM 7 codebase. Many have wondered why we bothered to finish CM 9 when we are already active in CM 10 development. To that, our answer is: we don't like to leave things incomplete. There is no profit gained from what we do, so the satisfaction of completing a goal is our only reward. This release also serves as a release suitable for the masses, especially those who won't have 100% functioning releases of CM 10 immediately or are averse to anything branded as 'preview', 'alpha', 'beta' or 'nightly.'"

You are right the summary was rushed and could have been better.
If you don't know what CyanogenMod is, it is an alternate open sourced ROM for Android devices. Phones and tablets can have this replace the stock ROM getting you more control over your device, and some alternate features. Often glitchy Android devices with propietary ROMs work better with this CyanogenMod.

I can't speak to Samsung specifically, but one of the problems with Android, compared to regular Linux (and this is also true for many embedded versions of ARM Linux), is that a lot of the device drivers are not open-sourced. And a lot of the others may be open-source, but haven't been merged into the mainline kernel, so they only work with specific kernel versions. So if a phone maker doesn't release their drivers as open-source, then porting a different CM/Android version to their phone may be impossible or extremely difficult.